Bargaining is a topic addressed in many persuasion texts and represents an important application of persuasive communication principles. Students may encounter difficulty, however, understanding how abstract bargaining plans and strategies can be used in real-life situations. Alternatively, some students may believe bargaining is simply a matter…

Blanton and Jaccard drafted a Postscript in response to our Reply. Their Postscript has two types of arguments: (a) repetitions of statements made previously in their article and already addressed in our Reply (thus needing no further comment here) and (b) regrettably, responses to arguments that they themselves constructed and attributed to us.…

Telling a lie, according to Harry G. Frankfurt, is different from engaging in bullshit because, while a lie is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs in order to avoid the consequences of having that occupied by truth, bullshit neither misrepresents the state of affairs to which it refers nor…

We live in a climate ripe for noise: Media outlets and 24-hour news cycles mean that everyone with access to a computer has access to a megaphone to broadcast their views. Never before in human history has an opinion had the opportunity to reach so many so quickly regardless of its accuracy or appropriateness. Of course, it's difficult to hear…

This research was conducted during an after-school partnership between a University and school district in an economically depressed, urban area. The school population consists of 99% African American and Latino students. During the informal after-school math program, a group of 24 6th-grade students from a low socioeconomic community worked…

We investigate whether the intervention designed by Kuhn and Udell (2003) to develop argument skills could be implemented productively among adolescent males in a residential juvenile detention facility--boys who were educationally disengaged and severely disadvantaged academically as well as socially. Compared to a control group from the same…

This article emphasizes the need to encourage undergraduate students to develop arguments, which involves enhancing their analytical skills and capacity for critical thinking, across disciplines regardless of level. It argues that these skills, required by the Quality Assurance Agency's (QAA) benchmarks, are developed not by instruction, but by…

Frantic parents trying to ensure that their children can maintain an edge throughout their school careers have become a fixture of today's society. Perhaps one key to the puzzle of academic motivation is to make school make sense, not just to those who structure the school systems or rely on them to educate their children, but to the young people…

Objective: To show how the results of research on children's memory, communicative skills, social knowledge, and social tendencies can be translated into guidelines that improve the quality of forensic interviews of children. Method: We review studies designed to evaluate children's capacities as witnesses, explain the development of the…

In this study, the effects of argumentation-eliciting interventions on conceptual understanding in evolution were investigated. Two experiments were conducted: In the 1st, 76 undergraduates were randomly assigned to dyads to collaboratively solve and answer items on evolution; half of them were instructed to conduct an argumentative discussion,…

Building on McMillan's two-way model of interactivity, this study presents a three-way model of interactive communication, which is used to assess political Web sites' progress toward the ideals of cyberdemocracy and the fostering of public deliberation. Results of a 3-year study of state legislature Web sites, an analysis of the community…

This article describes a study which was designed to explore how sentence openers supported students' construction of arguments in an online learning environment. The study involved a group of students from a teacher training institute in Singapore. As part of the overall teacher training program, the students attended a course that equipped them…

Involvement has long been theoretically specified as a crucial factor determining the persuasive impact of messages. In social judgment theory, ego-involvement makes people more resistant to persuasion, whereas in dual-process models, high-involvement people are susceptible to persuasion when argument quality is high. It is argued that these…

The psychological effect that racism has on individuals is of significant interest to mental health professionals. But it is of particular interest to those professionals who treat the clinical dimensions of the trauma to those who are involved in the assessment of the trauma for forensic purposes. Robert T. Carter provides a systematic,…

This study highlights the computer-mediated discursive activity of two dyads of first year educational sciences students, each collaboratively exploring several options for increasing the equilibrium size of a fish population in a lake. Our focus is on peers' attempts to come up with justified predictions about the adequacy of several options for…